Monday, September 22, 2014

Word on the street is that Alibaba, flush with $8 billion to spend improving the company's global outlook, may be considering truncating their brand to Baba.com to fight negative connotations of the word Alibaba in the US.This is in addition to my thought last week that Alibaba would be smart to do what Amazon didn't- that is to buy up all the EMD of their SKUs and redirect to those pages. By not doing that, Amazon ended up being Google's biggest competitor and also largest advertiser. Many billions have been spent to buy traffic that comes with every domain for free and eliminates reliance on tour competitor to put food on the table. As Rick Schwartz once asked the Google guys very wisely at T.R.A.F.F.I.C "why rent when you can own?"

“We want to be bigger than Walmart,” said Jack Ma, the founder and driving force of Alibaba Group, to CNBC on Friday, as his company’s shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Not only does Ma’s e-commerce giant want to surpass the Bentonville-based retailer, it thinks it will do so soon. In comments reported last October, Jonathan Lu, Alibaba’s chief executive, predicted the company will overtake Walmart to become the world’s largest retail network by 2016. Alibaba will reach transaction volume of $490 billion by that year, Lu predicted.

That’s not bad for the business founded by Ma, an out-of-luck English teacher, in 1999 in an apartment in Hangzhou. Since then, his online shopping sites have catapulted Alibaba past eBay and Amazon. In fact, Alibaba’s gross merchandise value is now bigger than that of the two American icons combined."

But in the United States, Alibaba is hard to remember and spell and has become associated with cheap Chinese counterfeit merchandise. The cable news network Al Jazeera America has seen this first-hand by using their name rather than Current's brand when they acquired the broadcaster from Al Gore and Joel Hyatt. Ratings have plummeted. The best way to overcome an engrained perception is REBRAND!That may be why domain brokers are moving in on a small one-man Antique floor finishing business in Pennsylvania to score an exclusive brokerage agreement to sell Baba.com domain to Alibaba and to finding a new domain for the flooring business to relocate to.There is nothing about the name Baba that means floor. But it does connote religious and spiritual meaning that may be the lynchpin for the company's great success. In that case, no amount of millions may move them from what they perceive to e a luck star. But the domain recently moved into privacy protection, but also at the same time got a new agency and redesign according to Screenshots.com. Stay tuned.